What's the difference between Corona and ALF?

ALF is really focused on providing the technology for choreographing tools across multiple developers, and Corona is more focused on making it easier to integrate tools within a single workbench environment or within a single desktop environment. [There are subtle differences], but there actually are important differences for developers.

Like what?

You ask this every time we talk. [I am] just trying to think of a way to make it really simple to explain. I mean think if it as ALF is focused on choreographing tool integration across a whole team. Corona is more focused on making it easier for one developer in his particular environment to do his job.

This next question is about something you mentioned -- I guess it must have been last year -- at a conference in San Francisco. You talked about how you don't really need salespeople anymore. And I just met with a company (Genuitec) that's basing its technology on Eclipse and they don't have any salespeople. Do you see that as a trend where software companies, particularly open source software companies, don't have salespeople because they don't see the need? Do you see anything happening there?

I think that over time things are changing. What you're really talking about is what is the channel by which people acquire software? There's multiple ways you can acquire software. You can download it and use it, whether it's for free or for purchase. You can buy it packaged or you can deal with a direct sales force and deal with people. Historically, enterprise software has been sold through the direct sales force channel, and I do believe over time, we're starting to see success in open source software products in areas that have been traditionally the realm of the direct sales force. I'm thinking of things like SugarCRM and Compiere and open source products like this. And those environments or those products have very, very low cost of sales, so as customers get more used to that, to being successful with that kind of software acquisition, I think that over time, yes, there's going to be fewer and fewer software salesmen.

Here's the standard question that I kind of usually ask last. Is anything going on as far as Sun joining Eclipse or merging NetBeans and Eclipse?

Nope, absolutely not.

No talks in the last year, two years?

I bump into (Sun executive) Simon Phipps at conferences and have a drink with him once in a while....

There was one Java project that I guess Sun was working on with Eclipse.

There was a Sun committer working on -- it was actually on the base Eclipse platform to enable it for Solaris x86, as I recall correctly. So it was getting Eclipse running on one of their operating system platforms.

But there's no further movement since then?

No. And [in the] conversations I've had with Sun, they've made it pretty clear that they're not really interested in doing anything other than continuing to push their NetBeans strategy.

What do you think of their being two kind of rival camps? Is it good for competition?

Well, we're certainly not shy of competition, and frankly we're winning.